


Metamorphose

by akaparalian



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Dragons, M/M, Manakete Felix Hugo Fraldarius, Manaketes (Fire Emblem), Sharing a Bed, Transformation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-12
Updated: 2020-05-12
Packaged: 2021-03-03 06:08:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24140110
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akaparalian/pseuds/akaparalian
Summary: In which Felix has a scaly secret and Sylvain has a lot of questions.
Relationships: Felix Hugo Fraldarius/Sylvain Jose Gautier
Comments: 2
Kudos: 101





	Metamorphose

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Seeking_Solace](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Seeking_Solace/gifts).



> So, a couple of things!
> 
> 1) This was originally written late last year, for the Sylvix Squad Discord server Secret Santa exchange. I delivered it to my lovely recipient in December... and then didn't ever post it on Ao3 because my life has been utter insanity. So, here it is now, finally! 
> 
> 2) I'm playing fast and loose with how manaketes and dragonstones and a lot of other elements of lore work, here, and my excuse is that _technically_ those things aren't canon in FE3H specifically beyond some Rhea Vagueness and therefore _technically_ I'm not doing anything wrong!!! 
> 
> That being said -- I hope you enjoy! <3

Sylvain has a lot of questions.

He's not going to actually _ask_ any of them, obviously — okay, not all of them — okay, not _most_ of them — because he doesn't have a death wish, but, saints. _So many questions._

For instance: "So, Felix, have the wings _always_ been there, or are those a recent development?" Or, well, asking about the horns, or the scales, or the _tail_ would all do equally well — equally well at getting him shouted at, that is, or punched. Not so much at actually getting the core of his question answered, with that core, of course, being a hearty _what the fuck_.

"Okay," he says, instead of expressing literally any of his concern or confusion or general blank inability to process what's happening right now. "Okay. So — are you... okay?"

Felix glares at him, but that's actually kind of comforting, if anything, and in this situation, Sylvain will take the comfort — especially given that Felix is still bleeding sluggishly from the wound on his shoulder that had been the start of all of this in the first place.

He'd always wondered, a little bit (fine, fine, more than a little bit, but he doesn't think he can be blamed) about why Felix was so incredibly touchy about the necklace. He can still remember a time before Felix wore it regularly, but since his brother’s death, Sylvain’s never seen him without the ice-blue teardrop sitting just below his collarbone on its sturdy silver chain. And he’d always been so damn particular about it, in a way that went just slightly beyond the believable but was simultaneously almost impossible to question. It wasn't as though Sylvain could conclusively say, "No, Felix, you're lying, the reason you go apeshit every time someone tries to touch your necklace, or even looks at it sideways, isn't actually because it's Glenn's." 

For one thing, that would make him even more of an ass than normal, but there were a couple of reasons beyond the obvious, even — namely including the fact that he'd only even gotten _that_ much of an explanation out of Felix with the help of a couple of illicit bottles of very strong Almyran spirits.

Still, the defensive responses about the damn necklace had always been just a little bit _too_ much, even for Felix, who has certainly never been a stranger to dramatics, though he’d probably punch Sylvain for saying so. The whole thing had been performative, almost, in the way he'd snarl and spit if Sylvain or Dimitri or Ingrid or even Ashe or Annette, who usually got slightly softer responses, asked about it — and goddess forbid anyone actually tried to touch it. But at the same time, underneath that layer of tempestuous rage, there'd been an incredibly real and tangible fear, the kind that was uncomfortable to look at.

Anyway, it turns out that taking off the necklace turns him into a dragon, so that's one mystery solved.

"I'm fine," Felix grits out, drawing his wings tightly closed behind himself. The initial shift, if Sylvain's being honest, had been outright terrifying: Felix, one moment, halfway to bleeding out behind a crumbling building in the aftermath of a vicious clash with a local Imperial force, and Sylvain digging around frantically trying to get his armor off to try and assess the damage, and then the next moment, Sylvain getting shoved to the ground as a creature three times the size of a warhorse sprouted where his best friend had been. It had taken him a long, horrified moment to even process what was happening, and then his next thought had been _Goddess, no, Miklan was bad enough, not Felix too, anything but that, **please —**_

And then by the time he'd gotten over his shock enough to reach for his lance, heart in his throat, Felix had managed to get the necklace back in his claws again, somehow, and was back to looking human again.

Mostly.

"Are you sure," Sylvain says, staring at the wings. The rest of it, he thinks he can deal with; honestly, the horns are just making Felix look hilariously like he's trying to copy Edelgard's little headdress, which he probably finds so damn funny partly out of frantic hysteria, but the _wings..._ He wets his lips and starts again. "Are you sure you're okay, because you were, uh, you were bleeding pretty bad, and..." 

"Yes," Felix says. "I'm fine. I'm _wonderful_. And I _was_ even _more_ fine before you decided to—"

"I didn't _decide_ to do anything!" Sylvain interrupts, forgetting, for a moment, even despite the evidence right before his very eyes, that Felix is — well, not that Felix is deadly, because Felix has _always_ been deadly, pretty much, but that Felix is even more deadly than he previously thought possible, maybe. "I wasn't going for the necklace, that was an accident, and, to be fair, it's not like I had any idea what would happen! I mean, come on, was I supposed to expect that—"

He manages to cut himself off there, his jaw snapping shut before he can blurt out something absolutely ridiculous. Felix seems to hear the absolute ridiculousness anyway, though, and his glare only grows more intense. 

"Were you supposed to expect what?" he asks, his voice deadly cold and full of scorn. "That I'm a monster? A _freak?"_

"That is _not_ what I was going to say," Sylvain argues, but then does a double take as, all at once, Felix flutters his wings a bit and they seem to disappear with little more than a twitch, simply gone between one moment and the next. "I was — I was going to — I'm sorry, I can't do this. What the hell is happening right now?"

For a long moment, Felix doesn't answer. Staring at him wide-eyed, Sylvain watches as, slowly, the other remaining features that mark him as anything other than human start to fade away: the scales shrink and then disappear entirely, the horns flicker out of sight with one impatient shake of Felix's head as though he's just trying to get a stray lock of hair out of his eyes, and the tail practically melts away into dust when Sylvain isn't paying attention to it. By the time Felix finally opens his mouth to respond, he looks human again. Normal. It's almost enough to convince Sylvain that he never saw anything at all — almost enough, except for the fact that something in Felix's eyes still looks a little haunted, unstable.

"We can't talk about this here," he mutters, and looks away, refusing now to meet Sylvain's eyes. "We can't — later. All right? Later."

Sylvain hesitates, then slowly, slowly nods. He offers Felix a hand to help him off of the ground, but Felix shrugs it off, standing under his own power and walking away without another word.

—

They don't speak — at all, not just with regard to the issue at hand — for some hours after that. Felix had all but sprinted away as soon as he was up off the ground, and by the time Sylvain had unfrozen his brain sufficiently enough to actually go after him, he'd managed to integrate himself back into the bulk of the fighting force, who were all bunching up together in order to tend to the most wounded and in preparation for the march back to camp, and disappear. Sylvain hadn't exactly been thrilled about that, but he'd also figured, as soon as he realized what was going on, that it was fine; it probably made sense, really, for them to both have a little time to... cool off. To think. 

Not that he's doing a lot of thinking as he rides along on the march home, per se; his mind is still mostly stuck going in circles around the word _dragon,_ with perhaps the addition of a few question marks and exclamation points thrown in for spice. _Dragon? Dragon? Dragon!_

 _..._ He'll be a little more settled by the time they make it back to the monastery, surely. And even if he's not, at least he'll have answers. Maybe he just needs a little more information before he'll be able to go beyond _dragon???,_ that's all. Surely there's _some_ explanation that will make this all make sense.

The trouble is, though, that he can't manage to find Felix at any point on the march back; he seems to have melted so thoroughly into the army that Sylvain hasn't been able to spot him at all amidst the crowd, which means — not that this comes as an especially terrible shock — that he must be avoiding Sylvain on purpose. Fair enough; Sylvain supposes he'd probably also like to take a little time to hide if he'd just been outed as scaly and winged. Still, it doesn't exactly bode well for that _later_ he was promised.

By the time the army finally makes its way back onto home turf, Sylvain has managed to force three thoughts through the sieve formerly known as his reasoning capacity, which has been completely blown to bits since the first moment he realized that Felix isn't, perhaps, one hundred percent human. 

First: well... Felix isn't one hundred percent human. Humans, to Sylvain's knowledge, cannot turn into dragons, or at least no one's ever let him in on the secret to doing so. If there's anything that's even remotely certain about this situation, it's that there is clearly _something —_ not _freaky_ , he thinks, remembering the way Felix's voice had shaken on the words _freak_ and _monster_ , but something... less than standard, something o _ther,_ about Felix Hugo Fraldarius that he's never seen before in his life.

Second, following from that: Felix has been hiding whatever it is about himself for his entire life, and Sylvain doesn't have the foggiest clue what it might actually be. It can't be a crest, or at least Sylvain's almost sure it can't be a crest, for a couple of reasons, chief among them being that if there was some crest out there that gave you the ability to turn into a fucking _dragon_ , he's fairly certain he would know about it. Even the Professor's crest, while unexpected and unorthodox, hadn't been entirely _unknown,_ at least not to people who knew what they were talking about. Also: if it were a crest, what reason would anyone have to hide it? Sylvain's seen the backside of the whole crest mess, sure, but his perspective on it isn't exactly the dominant one. That would be the kind of crest that people were crowing from the rooftops, an instant shot towards fame and power and strength and —

He cuts off that train of thought as best he can, frowning and trying to refocus. Right, so, it's not a crest, most likely. Any other options all seem equally unlikely and fantastical, but then, this whole situation is something he would have thought impossible until just a few hours ago. He might not know what's going on with Felix, but clearly, it's not going to come with a simple explanation. And whatever it is, somehow — if Felix's reaction is anything to go by — it's been entirely secret up until now. Which hardly seems possible, but all the same, Sylvain is left to assume that it must be the case.

Which leaves him with one final conclusion: Felix — and, Sylvain supposes, Rodrigue and Glenn and the rest of Felix's family by extension, mostly likely — must have a pretty damn good reason for hiding it, beyond just standard levels of secrecy. Whatever it is, he realizes with a growing sense of dread in the pit of his stomach, there must be some risk, some danger associated; he knows he hadn't imagined a single shred of the raw terror in Felix's eyes, or the way he'd hunched over himself, and he certainly isn't imagining the avoidance and reluctance now. 

The remaining question, he thinks grimly as their party rides on, is whether the risk is to others, or to Felix himself.

—

The eventual return to Garreg Mach is almost anticlimactic, with Sylvain so caught up in his own head that he hardly even notices the change in scenery. He goes about the processes required of him without putting much thought into any of them: he leads his horse to the stables, checks in briefly with the quartermaster, returns to his old dormitory. Mostly, he broods, which, if it doesn't go entirely unnoticed, at least doesn't seem to strike his companions as all that strange; Ingrid briefly catches his eye in the stable yard and quirks a brow at him, but doesn't appear concerned when he barely acknowledges her. In any other circumstance, maybe he'd be more interested in reflecting on the way his friends seem to expect this kind of behavior from him, or at least don't think it's _too_ strange to see him frowning and slightly out of it; at the moment, he's mostly just interested in looking around for Felix, who _still_ seems to have vanished.

Maybe he's a ghost as well as a dragon, Sylvain thinks sourly. That would certainly add some extra flavor.

By the time he's in his dormitory, out of his filthy armor and the sweat-soaked shirt he'd been wearing beneath it, changed into fresher clothing, and staring down at the floor without any semblance of a coherent thought passing through his head anymore, it is abundantly clear that continuing to wait for Felix to come to him is not going to work out. Felix is brave, and brash, and to-the-point when he wants to be, but he is also _excellent_ at avoiding conversations that he doesn't want to have. Sylvain has known him practically since the day he was born; he knows, now, that waiting around for Felix to actually decide that it's 'later' enough to have this conversation will leave him twiddling his thumbs until the end of the war, at least.

"This is impossible," he decides, muttering to himself in the quiet of his quarters and scrubbing a hand fiercely over his face. "This is — okay. I'm — I'll—"

He turns on his heel and goes for the door, face already set in a determined frown. Screw this; he'll _make_ Felix talk. He deserves answers, doesn't he? He deserves to know why one of his oldest friends sometimes turns into a dragon but never bothered to tell him about it, doesn't he? Felix won't be able to avoid talking to him, because Sylvain _won't let him_. He's going to take back control of this situation, and give himself something to think about instead of the way Felix's eyes had glowed preternaturally blue even after he'd more or less turned back into a human, and the way he'd towered over Sylvain in his dragon body but then immediately hunched down and made himself small when he was human again, and the way the deep, shimmering blue of his scales had contrasted with his pale skin as they faded away up his arms, and — 

The door swings open from the outside just as Sylvain reaches from the handle.

"Shit!" he yelps, even as Felix barrels past him, slamming the door shut and locking it before spinning on his heel to glare up at Sylvain, shoulders hunched defensively. "Goddess, Felix, you scared the hell out of me, give a guy some _warning—_ "

"Shut up," Felix snaps, which isn't exactly groundbreaking coming from him, but there's something about the _way_ he says it that sets Sylvain instantly on edge. The edge of outright aggression isn't quite there, or rather, it's _there_ , but it's subdued; he sounds incredibly tense, and not just tense, but _nervous_. Sylvain can count on one hand the number of times he's seen Felix identifiably nervous and likely still have some fingers left over. 

"Sorry," he replies, holding his hands up in a gesture of surrender. "Sorry, seriously. I just — you took me by surprise, that's all." He pauses a moment. "With the door, I mean. But also with the—"

"Shut _up_ ," Felix says again, hissing the words out through his teeth this time. He steps forward quick as anything and slaps a hand over Sylvain's mouth to interrupt him, and it's with a dim sense of shock that Sylvain realizes that the hand in question is shaking. "You can't talk about it. You can't just — you have to promise me _right now_ that you'll never say a word of it to anyone. I mean it, Sylvain, I'll — I'll fucking gut you."

He looks like he means it, too, and not just in the vague way that he usually seems to at least sort of mean his threats. Sylvain thinks he might have been right about the fact that this secret — whatever it is — is dangerous. He might, he realizes now, staring down at Felix wide-eyed, have been more right than he possibly could have realized.

"I can't say anything with your hand over my mouth," he says, or at least tries to; when Felix makes a short noise of disgust and rips his hand away, Sylvain says instead, "I swear, Felix, I do. On — whatever you want me to swear it on. My life? Your life? Everyone's life? On the Goddess? I _swear."_

"My life would be fitting," Felix mutters darkly, but he steps away at least, giving Sylvain a little personal space back. He's still frowning as he brushes past to stalk toward the dead center of the room, standing facing the back wall for a moment with his back to Sylvain and the door. When he turns, his face is slightly more clear, though the gravity of the situation is still vividly clear from the look in his eyes alone. He doesn't say anything else, though, only stands there staring, with his gaze fixed on Sylvain, unblinking. Unbidden, Sylvain's own eyes drift down to the necklace, back in its place around Felix's neck, as per usual. Maybe he's imagining things, but he'd almost swear it's glowing a little, pulsing ever so slightly in the rhythm of a heartbeat.

"Look," Sylvain says slowly, when it becomes clear that Felix isn't going to let up anytime soon. "I don't know what's going on, okay? I have _no_ idea what's happening here. But..." He trails off for a moment, frowning. He hadn't liked the way Felix had sounded when talking about swearing on his life. He hadn't liked it at all. "You know I'm on your side, right? I'm just as much on your side today, right now, as I was yesterday. I mean, I don't know what the scales are about, but—"

"Goddess, do you never stop being so—" Felix cuts him off, gesturing wildly in an apparent attempt to convey all the things about Sylvain which frustrate him. He's tried it before, and it's never quite worked out; this time, as always, he gives up after a few seconds, falling back on a simple scowl instead. Sylvain relaxes, though, at the visible proof that his words have gotten past whatever walls of anxiety Felix currently has up around himself: he doesn't cross his arms when he's done gesticulating, just drops them to his sides, and his scowl doesn't reach his eyes.

"No I do not," Sylvain responds cheerfully, then decides to push his luck a little. He steps closer, just enough that he's within the edge of Felix's admittedly rather generous personal bubble, and taps the place on his own breastbone where Felix's necklace rests against his. "So, now that we've talked about what a loveable scoundrel I am, can we please talk about the part where you turned into a _dragon_ earlier?"

"I didn't _turn into_ a dragon, I'm always a dragon," Felix snaps, and the tips of his ears immediately turn red. Sylvain could shout out loud with glee. _Bingo._

"That's a good starting place," Sylvain muses, half to himself, and moves to grab his desk chair and drag it across the room, gesturing for Felix to sit down on his bed as he does so. "That's the beginning, I suppose. More or less. When you say _always a dragon,_ have you always _been_ always a dragon, or...?"

Felix sighs through his nose, but he sits down on the edge of the bed obligingly, and he doesn't tense or stiffen up or turn away. There's a long pause, Sylvain's question hanging in the space between them with a thick air of anticipation, but then, finally, Felix relents, shaking his head very slightly and reaching up to rub at the necklace for just a split second before he finally answers.

"What exactly do you want to know?" he asks, and Sylvain's face splits slowly into a wide, ravenous smile.

—

They talk, in the end, for hours — longer than Sylvain can remember talking to Felix at a stretch possibly ever, and certainly in recently memory. They talk well past nightfall, well past the point where the moon is hanging sickle-thin in the sky outside, well past the hour when most of their comrades have no doubt fallen into bed, exhausted after battle and travel and the Goddess only knows what else. Sylvain is exhausted, too, or at least, he knows he _should_ be, but he barely feels it; his attention is focused wholly and completely on Felix, unwavering. He feels like he hardly blinks the entire time they're talking, let alone stop to consider other needs, like sleep or even properly washing up after the battle.

Felix doesn't seem especially concerned with physical needs, either; his eyes glow in the softening light, twin points of luminescence that reflect the soft lamplight and candlelight and the few beams of moonlight that are making it in through the crack beneath the door. His voice has gotten softer and softer the longer he's talked, and has just started to go slightly scratchy with overuse; Sylvain tries not to think about the things that little rasp in Felix's voice does to him, not while there are far more critical issues still at hand.

Felix had, indeed, started at the beginning. Not, necessarily, the truest, farthest-back beginning; Sylvain still has a few questions about when and how, exactly, people started being able to be dragons — or rather, dragons started being able to walk around as people — in the first place, but he hasn't really seen a good opportunity to ask, given that he's trying his best not to interrupt Felix once he gets going. But if he hadn't been able to answer every question about centuries-old history and the strange melding of magic and biology and the divine, or whatever the hell else it is that's going on inside of him, Felix has been able to answer most of his other questions:

"So, your whole family...?" Yes, through his mother's line. Interbreeding with normal humans — like Rodrigue — apparently makes things a lot spottier and harder to control, which makes some level of sense, Sylvain supposes. Felix hadn't been able to transform out of his human form at all until adolescence, and he still has much more trouble controlling his shift than his mother ever has; these are just a few of the side effects he blames on his father's weaker, human blood.

"The necklace is to control the shift, then?" Yes and no; suppress it, keep it contained, moreso than control it. It's not really _controlled_ when simply removing the necklace forces him to shift, after all. For having not been able to shift at all until adolescence, Felix has certainly found it easy enough ever since — too easy, in fact. Easy enough to be bordering on unmanageable. Hence the necklace.

"Then it's not really Glenn's?" No, it is Glenn's. Had been, that is; having been older, and having always found shifting easier than Felix, he'd worn it for much the same reason Felix does now, though for him, it had been more of a failsafe than a necessity, or so Felix says, anyway. 

He had gone almost quiet for a long while after answer that question, not quite managing to get out anything else concrete, and Sylvain had had to pivot a little desperately to redirect, his heart suddenly racing.

"So if you didn't transform until you were 11, did you have to learn how to fly the hard way, or did it come naturally, like an instinct?" This redirect had been effective; it had taken a moment, Felix physically shifting a little as though to shake off the pall, but then he had started to describe the process of learning to fly, and before he'd gotten to the end of explaining the mechanics of it, his voice had been even and steady again, matter-of-fact. He had indeed, it turns out, had to learn to fly 'the hard way'; it had taken him months, which he doesn't seem to view as an admission of weakness at all, and, Sylvain supposes, that's fair enough. He supposes taking a few months to _learn how to fly_ in your _dragon shift_ because your mother's inheritance is _turning into a dragon_ is probably excusable.

They've been going on and on like that for so long now that Sylvain has almost forgotten that the impetus for all of this had been that they'd been in a battle early this very same day, but his body, eventually, elects to remind him. He shifts only slightly, trying to rearrange himself in his desk chair just enough that his limbs don't all fall asleep, and instead of the pins and needles of cut-off circulation, he's met with the screaming soreness of muscles that had had to carry him around in full armor and keep him from being skewered on the end of Imperial blades and then not even gotten so much as a bit of a soak in the baths afterwards, let alone a healing spell.

"Ow," he mutters without meaning to, and Felix immediately stops what he'd been saying — a description of how much larger his mother is than he himself, something else he blames on Rodrigue's fully human influence — and focuses completely on Sylvain instead.

"Were you injured?" he asks sharply. That rasp in his voice is more pronounced now, not just because he's been talking even longer, but because he's raised his voice a little, and it strains with the effort. "You idiot, did you not even — shit, we've both been sitting here without having even washed off the grime," he says, slowly, as though the idea is just now dawning on him in real time.

Sylvain winces a little. "We have," he admits, shrugging. "But can you blame me? What, I'm supposed to focus on winding down from battle when I could be thinking about you being a dragon instead? Half-dragon, whatever, whatever," he amends immediately, flapping a hand to dismiss Felix, who's already opening his mouth.

"Shut up, moron, that's not what I was going to — ugh," Felix mutters, scrubbing a hand over his face. "Damn you, I can't believe you got me to — damn it. All right, it's late, and I'm going to train tomorrow, and — I've stayed here too long already. Far too long. If you have other questions, they can _wait._ " He starts to get up, hoisting himself from Sylvain's bed, and something about it triggers and almost fight-or-flight reflex in Sylvain's mind. He acts without thinking — for far from the first time today, let alone in the rest of his life.

"You should stay here," he says quickly, then immediately freezes when he realizes what he's blurted out.

Felix freezes, too, halfway off the bed, holding himself frozen in place awkwardly as he stares at Sylvain as though he's suddenly grown a second head. His quarters are literally two doors down; there's no reason for him not to walk the fifteen meters it would take to get there, or at least Sylvain can't think of one, no matter how hard he wracks his brain. And yet he knows what he wants, and in this case, what he wants is for Felix to not leave his sight, no matter how illogical that might be. Maybe it's something about all the realizations and revelations he's experienced today, or maybe it's just an aftereffect of the battle that he's actually capable of indulging for once, or maybe he's just so damn _tired_ that any and all higher brain function has been overridden by his core instincts. Regardless, he winces at his own outburst, and he doesn't offer any sort of reasonable explanation, because he _can't_ offer any sort of reasonable explanation, but he doesn't try to walk it back, either.

Finally, after a few long moments of incredulous silence, Felix stands the rest of the way up and crosses his arms, his brows drawn. "Are you not even going to try to justify that?" he says skeptically, and Sylvain — well, all he feels he can really do at this point is paste on a smile and hope for the best.

"Oh, come on, it's not _that_ strange of a request, is it?" he tries, aiming for a reasonable, winning tone. "We used to sleep in the same bed sometimes."

"Yes, when we were _children_ ," Felix says, sounding awfully close to waspish. "And even then, it was usually only when Ingrid and Dimitri were there, too. You want me to go get them and see if we can make it a party? I'm sure they won't mind being woken up in the middle of the night so we can all cuddle."

"No!" Sylvain replies quickly, holding both hands up in surrender. "No, of course that's not — you're being ridiculous. Look—"

" _I'm_ being ridiculous? You're being—"

"It's been a long, strange, terrifying day," Sylvain says, as quickly as he can. He seems to have already dug himself a pretty deep hole here; the only thing left to do now is keep going and going until he either hits bedrock or comes out on the other side. "I woke up this morning not knowing you were a dragon, and now I know that you are a dragon. Because you turned into one, right in front of me, in the middle of a battle. And it's late, and we both could easily have died today, and I just — is it that strange that I want to keep an eye on you?"

Goddess damn it. A _just keep digging_ philosophy is one thing, but being as tired he is may have made him a little too honest. He watches Felix apprehensively, already bracing for impact, so tense that he feels that any moment might be the one where he finally snaps like a worn bowstring.

But Felix just stares at him — confused, still, and skeptical, and definitely not warm and fuzzy and full of feeling, but also not full of rage. The longer time goes on without him flying across the room in a rage and beating Sylvain about the head and shoulders, the more Sylvain starts to feel that some part of that must have actually gotten through, somehow, as impossible as that seems. It's not like he hasn't tried honesty before, after all — it might not be his typical modus operandi, sure, but it's not like he's never spoken honestly to Felix about his feelings. Well. Not _all_ of his feelings, not his capital-F Feelings, which he hardly acknowledges within the safety of his own mind, let alone in the great wide world. But surely Felix knows that he _cares_ , in the way one cares about old, dear friends and comrades and brothers-in-arms and —

"Don't make me regret this," Felix mutters, and throws himself decisively back down onto the bed. He starts stripping down with little to no fanfare, shucking off his boots and trousers and jacket and overclothes and getting down to the level of plain, worn linen practically before Sylvain has even had time to process what's happening.

Oh, Goddess save him, telling the truth there might have worked a little _too_ well. He's never going to let himself get this tired and emotionally raw and generally wrung-out around Felix ever again, not if it ends up with him forced to get into bed with Felix stripped down to his smallclothes after they've spent hours and hours baring secrets to one another — okay, fine, Felix was mostly the one baring secrets, that's not the point — and generally spending more time in emotional intimacy than Sylvain has spent with any human being in all of Fodlan in literally years.

"Ah," he says, many moments too late, and starts to strip down himself, a little more slowly than Felix but no less carelessly. Good thing he hasn't been doing any thinking about those capital-F Feelings lately. That might make this difficult. But given that he hasn't been doing any such thinking, and all he's doing right now is getting into his perfectly reasonably sized bed with a friend — a friend who, as he himself had so recently pointed out, he has certainly slept alongside before — there's nothing to be concerned about in the slightest. It's not as though he doesn't share his bed with other people regularly... though that, on second thought, might not be the best mental avenue to walk down when he's looking down at Felix sitting sullenly on the edge of his bed, working at the bit of leather cord that's holding his hair back.

"Damn it," Felix mutters, giving the cord a vicious yank, and it's only then that Sylvain snaps out of his panicked internal monologue enough to realize that he really ought to intervene.

"Here, here, let me," he says, batting Felix's hands away and shoving at his shoulder to get him to turn around for better access. "You're going to tear all your hair out pulling like that."

"It's my hair, not yours, I think I know how to handle it better than you," Felix mutters, but he turns anyway, if not exactly obligingly. Having him facing away actually proves to help with more than just ease of access to the hair tie; no longer having to look him in the eye, or else avoid his gaze, feels like a weight lifted from somewhere low in Sylvain's gut.

"Don't give me that when you're pulling at it like it's the most numb-mouthed old hack in the stable," Sylvain mutters, but he can't help the extent to which his hands contrast with his voice. He can't stop himself from running them over Felix's scalp, gentle and dangerously close to reverent, and he certainly can't prevent the way they settle down at the nape of his neck for just a moment, just long enough to be incriminating, before flitting back up to actually get to work untangling the knot that's formed around the leather tie. 

Felix doesn't offer any sort of response or retort, at least not beyond an almost entirely inaudible mumble, and Sylvain finds himself only too grateful to let the conversation lapse as he works. Felix's hair, it turns out, is in a right state — not surprising given the day they've had, he supposes, but it does make him wince. It takes several minutes for him to carefully work the tie out, and by the time he manages to get it free, they've been sitting in silence for so long that he almost doesn't know _how_ to break it.

Finally, though, he lets his hands fall away and says quietly, "There you go," handing the leather tie over Felix's shoulder so he can put it somewhere or do whatever he wants with it. It's truly rude, the way he has to take his hands out of Felix's hair at that point, the way he has to stop touching it just because he no longer has an excuse to do so. It's unreasonable, and it's unjust, and he forces himself to do it anyway, forces himself to put a more than healthy amount of distance between them, and furthermore, he forces himself to smirk a little and pat Felix on the shoulder as he moves away as though nothing at all out of the ordinary has happened. Felix, after all, doesn't need to know that his heart is pounding a little faster than it probably should be, or that he's already realizing that one of his pillows is going to smell like Felix's hair by tomorrow morning.

"Next time you get so tangled up in your own hair that you need a rescue, you let me know, okay?" he says cheerfully, and when Felix swears at him and whips around to glare, it's a distinct relief. So much has changed about his perceptions of Felix — of the world in general, really — in the past day, but not everything has to change, surely. Even in the face of something he could hardly have imagined yesterday, even now that he knows things he still half-believes to be impossible, he can still maintain his expert levels of obfuscation and not-quite-honesty. He can still keep his own secrets, even when Felix's are laying bare all around them, scattered through the room like little spots of starlight.

—

The first thing — the very first thing — that Sylvain realizes the next morning is that everything that happened the day before was real. It may take him a moment of laying there with his eyes blankly open, staring up at the ceiling, to even remember what that 'everything' _was,_ but once he has worked through all of it and brought himself back up to speed, he finds it almost shockingly easy to believe that it was all real, and not something he somehow dreamed up.

Far harder to come to terms with is the fact that Felix is still curled up next to him, sleeping soundly and letting out the tiniest little fluttering snores that have surely ever existed.

Oh, yes, of course, this is the way his life has gone, Sylvain thinks with no small amount of bitterness, this is what he's grown into: a person who has, after his initial shock, relatively little trouble coming to terms with the fact that his oldest friend is in fact a dragon, but who can hardly seem to wrap his mind around the fact that the two of them have shared a bed for the night, even though it was _his_ terrible, horrible, indescribably bad idea in the first place.

"Fuck me," he mouths up to his ceiling, before screwing his eyes shut tight and taking several deep, slow breaths in through his nose and out through his mouth. All right. Felix is still asleep — he's incredibly terrible at pretending to sleep, or at least he was the last time Sylvain had the opportunity to observe it, and, granted, that was over a decade ago, but he finds it relatively hard to believe that Felix would honestly have improved in that time, and all of this knowledge synthesizes into the fact that Sylvain is almost entirely certain he really _is_ asleep, and not just faking. That's good news, as is the fact that there's a good few inches of space between them, and the fact that Felix is lying on his side, facing away. All of these things are incredibly superior options when compared with their alternatives, which, of course, Sylvain can't quite stop himself from considering: Felix curled up tight against his side, or cradled against him back-to-front, or sprawled half on top of him with their legs tangled together, or—

But luckily, _thankfully_ , none of those things are the case, and he is free to ever-so-cautiously lever himself upright, trying very hard not to wake Felix just yet. It's a relief to have made it through the night, he supposes, though not a relief that he's woken with the sun despite having finally crawled into bed so very late the night before. That must be the only reason Felix is still asleep; he's usually an early riser, but he must be completely exhausted. Sylvain knows he himself is, and _he_ hadn't even turned into a dragon yesterday — Felix had mentioned, briefly, that the shifts are incredibly draining, which is one small part of the reason he doesn't shift more often, alongside the risk of discovery and the sheer physical limitations of finding a place to transform that can both hide him and accommodate his bulk.

Getting himself sat up only solves a small portion of the problem, of course; it doesn't give him any better idea of what to do about the fact that Felix is slumbering peacefully on right next to him, his face slack and easy for once, his brows not pinched in irritation, his lips not twisted into a scowl. Sylvain is, of course, going to have to wake him up and undo all of that lovely peaceful, restful nonsense, but that doesn't mean he can't take a moment to appreciate it first.

What good is waking Felix up going to do, though? He bites his lip as he stares down, conflicted. Felix, now that he's rested, is probably going to just go ahead and kill him for this anyway, and while there may not be any point in delaying the inevitable, Sylvain's not exactly trying to rush the advancement of his own demise, either. And when Felix is awake, in addition to the undeniable, swift, and hopefully merciful death that's coming for him at the end of a finely-honed blade, Sylvain is going to have to face down with the only thing he can think of that frightens him more than Felix's disapproval in this moment: his own mind. 

There's no question that somewhere in the past twenty-four hours, between waking up yesterday and preparing for battle and waking up now in what almost seems like an entirely different reality where he knows that Felix has been keeping an immense, impossible secret for his entire life, Sylvain crossed a line that he's not sure he can ever un-cross. Already he can feel how much harder it is to push down on all those things he's been blithely ignoring, the feelings and thoughts and — and wants that have never seemed to do him much good for all they crowd his mind and dog his steps. 

Even now, even with everything that has changed between them in the past twenty-four hours, he can’t keep himself from falling into his own damned trap. He squeezes his eyes shut tight for just a moment, taking a long, deep, steady breath and trying to trying not to let his thoughts wander to far astray. Felix trusted him with something incredible yesterday, and it might not have been entirely on purpose, but it had still meant something — and the way Felix had stayed up late into the night answering all of his ridiculous questions had _certainly_ meant something. Sylvain may be somewhat less than morally upstanding from time to time, he may have a different view on interpersonal relationships than many of his friends, but there’s no way he could live with himself if he took that and twisted it, turned it into something crass. In a way, this kind of intimacy just puts Felix even farther out of reach; in a way—

“Damn it, we’ll have missed breakfast for sure.”

Sylvain startles so hard that he nearly falls out of the bed. “Goddess!” he blurts, one hand automatically flying up to cover his thundering heart. “You scared the hell out of me.”

Felix, perhaps unsurprisingly, is looking at him like he’s an idiot. “I’ve been awake for a bit,” he deadpans. “I didn’t think it was that easy to take you by surprise.”

“Yes, well, excuse me for not being at my best this morning,” Sylvain grumbles, hastily getting out of bed in part to cover up the way he’s still terribly on edge. Felix lingers in the bed for a moment, watching him, but when Sylvain starts stumbling around the room trying to locate clean clothes, he gets up, too. “We _have_ probably missed breakfast, but I think we can still scrounge something up. I’m more worried that Dimitri will be looking for us. It must be nearly noon.”

He gets a grunt of agreement, but nothing more, and he briefly glances over his shoulder in surprise. He would have expected Felix to engage with that a little more — maybe some grumbling about _the boar_ this and _animal_ that — but instead he finds Felix simply watching him, frowning. 

It’s unsettling, to say the least.

Of course, it’s ridiculous to be too thrown by it, Sylvain tells himself as he hastily looks away again. Turning into a dragon is one thing, but Felix can’t see inside his head, not unless he was concealing some very key details last night. He’ll just have to play things cool, and then disappear for the afternoon to give himself some time alone to get over the odd, shivery feeling that’s still far too in control of him right now.

He pulls on a pair of trousers very determinedly. Yes. A little time alone, to clear his head, to process, to forget what waking up next to Felix had felt like.

“All right, then,” he says, turning around to face Felix once he feels good and ready, plastering a pleasant smile on his face. “I’m ready when you are.”

But Felix is frowning at him, eyes narrowed. When Sylvain quirks an eyebrow at him, waiting for some kind of actual response, they only narrow further.

“Felix?” he prompts after a moment, and immediately wishes he’d just let it drop. He can tell before Felix even opens his mouth that he’s not going to like what comes out of it.

“You’re acting strange,” Felix says simply, speaking not with suspicion but with utter confidence. “Why?”

Sylvain’s heart freezes in his chest a little, but he frowns in polite confusion. “What are you talking about?”

"Don't play dumb with me," Felix says, not so much short and waspish as firm and plain. He tugs slightly at the cuffs of his shirt — a little rumpled from spending all night on Sylvain’s floor, a thought which is not exactly helpful — and then crosses his arms. "I'm probably the one person in this whole worthless world that won't work on. I'm not stupid either, Sylvain. You’re being strange; you’ve been strange all along, you were just hiding it better before, I think. I know there's something I'm not seeing here. I need you to tell me what it is."

"I," Sylvain says, barely managing to work out any sounds at all with the way his entire stomach is attempting to crawl up his windpipe and out of his mouth. The facade is instantly and utterly gone. "I really don't think you do want that, actually, Felix; I think if you knew—"

"Let me make that decision," Felix says, arching one brow and crossing his arms. "What, I can trust you to keep a secret that quite literally has the potential to kill me, but you can't even trust me not to immediately run you through if you tell me yours? Did you kill someone?"

Sylvain can't help it: he laughs, a dry, bitter sound that seems to shake out of him more than anything else. "Oh, much worse than that, Fe, I promise."

“Shut up, you bastard, that was a serious question,” Felix snaps. “If what you’re not telling me is that you’ve killed my kind before, or you’re going to kill me, then just say it, and let’s get it over with. If it’s anything _less_ than that—”

“Stars, Felix, no, I’m not going to kill you,” Slyvain snaps, flushing. Apparently he’s not allowed _any_ melodrama of his own; it all belongs to Felix now, who’s scowling at him with rumpled hair falling into his face, more than a little red-cheeked himself. 

“Then what?” he grits out; his eyes flash, steely, and Sylvain is so close, _so close,_ to feeling something inside him give in. It would almost be easier, at this point, to give in and let it all sit out in the open. Almost, almost, but not quite — not enough for him to actually bring himself to get the words out.

It’s been well over a decade, after all — so long now since they met, and with so much death and suffering in between, that it really is getting harder and harder to remember what life was even like before he realized that he would probably be in love with Felix until his dying day.

“Stop pushing,” is all he manages to say, after all that. It comes out quieter than he intends, too; the words barely make a dent in all the tension in the air between them. 

“Stop _pushing?”_ Felix says, incredulous. Everything feels like it’s accelerating at a rate Sylvain can’t control; Felix’s expression is like a knife to the gut, twisting with every word that comes out of his mouth. “ _I’m_ pushing? I told you _everything_ you wanted to know, things that could easily get me _killed_ —” 

“And why do you want to know this so bad?” Sylvain interrupts. He’s close to shouting now, his shoulders creeping up to his ears. “What do you think I could possibly have to say that could measure up to that?”

“Because—” Felix starts to say, and then clearly thinks the better of it. He hesitates for just a moment, his mouth chewing silently on what seems to be a torrent of words that won’t quite come out, and then he opts for motion instead: in two quick steps he’s across the space dividing them, and then his hands are fisted in Sylvain’s collar and the whole world grinds to a halt.

They pull apart after seconds, or minutes, or hours, and between one breath and the next, Sylvain’s whole world is realigned. When he opens his eyes again, Felix is still right there, barely a hair’s breadth away. He’s incontestably familiar, and yet there’s something slightly foreign shining just behind his eyes, something new and exciting that Sylvain can’t wait to puzzle out.

“Let’s talk about this over breakfast,” he breathes. The way Felix slowly, slowly smiles in response warms him to the tips of his toes.

“This one I think we can afford to discuss in public,” he says drly, hiding just the slightest hint of a laugh behind his sardonic tone, and when Sylvain reaches for his hand, he finds it already outstretched, warm and waiting.

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on [Twitter!](http://twitter.com/akaparalian)


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